upon it, and the courts are mere ciphers. Instead of a Government having three departments, it would consist of one only.

Should the President be convicted and removed from office, and Mr. Wade come into the presidential chair, the Supreme Court is to receive further attention from Congress. Instead of permitting the number of judges to be reduced to six, as the law now requires, it is the intention to increase it to thirteen, thus allowing him to select and add six to the present number. These will, of course, be partisans of the extreme radical stamp. By this large addition it is expected that the court will long remain Republican, and sustain whatever laws that party in Congress In that event, there will be no possible restraint upon their exercise of power. With Mr. Wade at the head, and the Court obedient to the will of Congress, our Government will become changed in its character, and constitutional liberty cease to exist among us. We shall live under a purely legislative tyranny, devoting its energies to taxing the people and to the perpetuation of its power.

may pass.

128.-DESTRUCTION OF THE HIGHEST COURT IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

When Mr. Lincoln came into power there was a civil court in the District of Columbia, called the Circuit Court, with similar powers of other United States Circuit Courts, and which was also an appellate court. There was also a criminal court, with the usual powers of a Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Sessions. In the former were three able, learned, and good men, two of whom had sat there for many years. There was a vacancy in the criminal court, the sole judge having recently died. In the civil court the judges continued to execute the Fugitive-Slave Law, and to issue the writ of habeas corpus, as had been usual before the war. This gave great offence to the Republicans, who declared that these were impeachable offences. Congress took up the subject, but, instead of impeaching, a bill was promptly passed by both Houses, and approved by Mr. Lincoln, abolishing both courts, and creating one with four judges, to be called the Supreme Court of the District, with both civil and criminal juris

diction. This court was filled with non-resident judges-one from Ohio, one from New York, one from Delaware, and one from Virginia, neither of whom had any knowledge of the laws or the practice under them in the District, and neither with any considerable reputation as lawyers. Three of them had been in Congress. They all had the reputation of being extreme partisans of the Republican stamp, except the last, who was only moderate. The new Chief Justice has been, since his appointment, an active and busy politician of the severe kind. A majority of this court could be relied upon on all questions where Republican partisan grounds were at the bottom, and it was not expected that it would venture to declare any law which Congress might pass to be unconstitutional, or any act of President Lincoln or his administration to be illegal. Here was a court, composed of men in no wise inferior to those now on the bench, legislated out of office for political purposes. No charge was ever preferred against Judges Dunlop, Morsell, or Merrick. The bar were satisfied with them, as were the suitors of the court. But they had the audacity to execute their duties as judges, and, it was feared, would not prove subservient enough to please the Administration. They stood, politically, one Democrat and two Whigs. Their commissions, like all commissions of judges of the Federal courts, were during good behavior. The court is abolished and gone, by statute, but they are judges still, in waiting for an opportunity to perform their duties, and entitled to pay as such, though they have received none since they were legislated off the bench. Political legislation, to overthrow or build up courts, is against the genius of our institutions. The Constitution, by express provision, protects the courts from such wanton acts. But nothing stands long in the way of the partisan feelings and interests of the Republicans of our day. They treat the Constitution as a by-gone instrument, not entitled to respect when it stands in the way of the will of Congress.

129.-EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS DURING THE WAR.

One of the objections raised against Mr. Cameron, as Secretary of War, was his declining to exchange prisoners of war upon

the usual terms. When Mr. Stanton came in, he openly avowed his intention of making exchanges, on the ground of humanity to our men then prisoners with the rebels. The sentiment as avowed was not only justifiable, but was clearly right. How far he acted in conformity with his professed intentions is not known. But, ere long, exchanges substantially ceased. The Confederates had enacted a statute directing that, when their officers should take negroes who were or had been slaves, they should be sent to the States where they belonged, to be delivered up to their masters, which prevented the exchange of negroes by the Confederate officers. This state of things could only be changed by an act of the Confederate Congress, which was not done. The abolitionists and many Republicans took exceptions to exchanging at all, unless the negroes should be included. They were willing the white soldiers imprisoned by the secessionists should remain shut up, with hard fare, or almost none at all, and die off, if the negroes could not also be exchanged at the same time, to prevent their delivery to the State authorities to be returned to their masters, in conformity with the Confederate law. The appeals of those suffering in prison and their friends produced no change in the purposes of those who were willing to punish thousands of patriotic white men to carry a point concerning the negro. They were willing to see white men perish, as they did in vast numbers, rather than to permit the slave to be returned to his master if claimed. Their sympathies were all for a few negroes, leaving the white men to perish for want of freedom and exercise, and the food, clothing, attention, and the kind treatment of home. They complained of the injustice and inhumanity of the treatment of our prisoners, but stood in the way of relieving them by exchange. They would permit the white man to be punished, to starve and die, in preference to having the negro returned, under the Confederate law, to the man who was bound to take care of and provide for him. If they could not secure all they wanted, they preferred all our men in prison should die miserable deaths.

The public has never been satisfied with this refusal to exchange prisoners. The Confederate authorities offered several times to exchange, wrote letters to our officers, and they wrote to

the War Department, but received no written answer, and no acceptance of the offers. The newspapers charged that the Secretary of War declared he would not exchange healthy rebel prisoners for our sick and skeleton men in the enemy's prisons, because it would add to the number of fighting men of the rebels, and few, if any, to our ranks. If this was his motive, it is less honorable than the abolition effort to protect the negro. Another motive may have contributed something to this resolution. By painting the horrors of the rebel prisons and the frightful condition of our men in them, a feeling of burning vengeance might be engendered, and result in the friends of the prisoners, and thousands of others, rushing into our ranks to crush out those guilty of the crimes imputed to the Confederates. But whether Mr. Stanton used the words attributed to him or not, there can be no question that the Administration was impelled by the motive attributed to him. Whether the thought originated in the cabinet with Mr. Lincoln or Stanton, or in the field among the of ficers, it is certain that General Grant acted in conformity with it. The authority of Swinton, in his work, "The Army of the Potomac," has never been called in question. At page 171 he says: "The South did not so much lack men, as the men lacked interest in the war. The conscription then became odious, and evasion universal, while those who wished to escape military service readily found those at home willing to open their ranks, let them slip through, and close up behind them. It finally came about that men enough to form three armies of the strength of Lee's lay, perdu, beyond the power of recovery of the Richmond authorities. To this must be added the fact that a prodigious number of Confederate troops-probably as many as there were in the ranks of both Lee and Johnston-were, during the last eighteen months of the war, kept out of the field by being retained as prisoners at the North, under a fixed determination of General Grant not to exchange them—a measure that was certainly an effectual agency in the Lieutenant-General's avowed plan of 'hammering continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources until by mere attrition, if by no other way, there should be nothing left of him.'" Swinton was with the Army of the Potomac, and

saw and heard what occurred, and a witness to the avowed objects of General Grant, who was certainly acting upon the motives imputed to Stanton. Concerning this there can be no mistake. This renders it perfectly certain that the thousands who perished in rebel prisons were the helpless victims of a policy acted upon by Grant, and assented to, if not dictated, by Lincoln, Stanton, and the Administration. They at first pretended that the rebels would not exchange. That pretence has been effectually and conclusively disproved; and we now have the fact staring us in the face that the non-exchange was the fault of our side, carrying out a fixed determination not to exchange, under the apprehension that the Confederates would return to their ranks and do service, and that our soldiers were not sufficiently patriotic to do so, which is a gross slander upon them. It was the Confederates, and not our men, who sought, at this time, to slip away from service. Our army was almost entirely composed of volunteers, while theirs was largely made up of unwilling conscripts, to obtain which General Grant said "they have robbed the cradle and the grave." Our commissary and pay departments were well supplied, while their commissariat scarcely prevented starvation, and their paymasters were without available money. General Johnston, after his surrender, attributed their failure to these deficiencies. Hence, if the exchanges had been made, it is probable that a greater proportion of our men than of the Confederates would have returned to the field for duty. Our men had a right to demand an exchange, without regard to its effect upon the fighting part of the army. We had volunteers enough to do all the fighting, without murdering our men in the Confederate prisons, for fear their exchange might add to the numbers of the fighting men of the enemy. The laws of humanity, the laws of war, the laws of duty required this, but all three were violated; for which no valid excuse can be rendered, whether the fault lay with the Administration, or with Grant, whose disregard of the health, comfort, and lives of his men, since his campaign from Washington to Richmond, has become so proverbial. There can be no denial of the existence of the inhuman abandonment of our soldiers to the fate of starving, sicken